An email from 2030

Ko-designing a new architecture and culture of funding.

Imagine reading this email in 2030 — and knowing you helped bring that future into being.

In Kiwaatule, communities of life; landstewards, future generations, and Nalubaaga Wetland — are learning to listen to the web of life, sense, decide, and act together for life in their place.

The Funders Learning Journey invites another community of life — a small cohort of peer funders — to join them in practice. Not to direct the process from outside, but to help design how money can nourish what communities of life have already decided is needed and valued in their place.

This begins in Kiwaatule, but it is not only for Kiwaatule. Together, you will help build a financial nourishment blueprint that can travel to many bioregions — each on its own terms.

Join the Funders Learning Journey → Read the Kiwaatule story to know why

“One of the most profound conversations I had over the last year was with somebody of significant wealth basically saying that over the next 30 years, given the context we’re in, he expects to lose 90% of his wealth. This was a very hyperrational, non-morally rooted gentleman. But he recognized something really important. His wealth was fundamentally entangled with the planet. That recognition started to change his theory of how he actually had to operate.”

— Indy Johar

Why this matters to funders

Funding can either weaken or strengthen the spirit of stewardship.

The question is not only where money flows, but what kind of capacity it grows as it flows.

Conventional funding often moves toward isolated problems through plans, proposals, metrics, and expert validation. These tools can protect accountability, but they can also force living processes into fixed outcomes and take agency away from the communities who must live with the consequences.

Life does not work that way. A place is not a set of separate problems. It is an entangled web of relations.

Obuntu Resets begins from that web. Communities of life gather, listen to the intelligence of their place, determine what is needed and valued, issue Units of Caring, and invite funders to respond through a learning journey that develops finance inside out.

A web-of-life diagram: dozens of entangled nodes — birds, wetland, soil, kinship, trust, care, markets, livelihoods, future — all connected to one another.
The web of relations that nourishes a place.

Kiwaatule is not the point. It is the sandbox. What we build here — a way for money to nourish the web of life a community has decided to heal — is a financial-nourishment blueprint meant to be adapted by other places. This journey is about evolving funding in and of itself. You are not supporting one initiative; you are helping prototype an infrastructure for lasting systems evolution.

Track record & momentum · relational health rebuilt so far
92%Landowners engaged so far expressed willingness to steward collectively when collaboration is made safe, transparent and place-rooted.
80+Residents walked Nalubaaga, mapping springs, flood zones, biodiversity, waste flows and cultural sites, shifting from isolated plots to a shared bioregion.
35Landowners enrolled in the journey of learning how private land rights can support collective care for the whole.
1wetland welcomed back into governance circle as a living member, not a resource. Attuners listen to her intelligence and reflect it in gatherings.
19An organising committee was nominated to carry the work from individual concern into collective governance.
9relations prioritised for healing across 2026, each with its own Obutaka Gathering Cycle; the first healing cycle is already underway.
Re-TrustingTwo years of patient, in-home dialogue turned fears of "land grabbing" into a shared vision — trust is the foundation everything else stands on.
Re-StewardingA 19-member Organising Committee co-created Obuntu bylaws and is growing into carrying collective responsibility for the bioregion, not just plots.
Re-LandingLand is becoming a source of agency and caring: one decimal of land becomes one stewarding weight (vote) in collective decisions.
Re-GeneratingThe first Obutaka Gathering prioritised nine relations turning into a practice of healing and renewing local livelihood possibilities.
Where funders come in

Completing the cycle of life.

Communities of life move through four gatherings — learning to see, to make meaning, to decide, and to act together. But a decision alone cannot heal a relation. The cycle stays open until what was decided is nourished into action. That is the place funders are invited to complete.

Communities of life land · waters · soils · plants residents · future generations 3 · Decision Gathering deciding together 2 · Kin Gathering making meaning together 4 · Action Gathering acting together 1 · Knowledge Gathering learning to see together Funders complete the cycle ↩ The cycle is incomplete here. A decision has been made, but it needs nourishment to become action.
The community walks the solid path. The dotted arc is where money — by responding to a decision already valued and committed to by the communities of life  — completes the cycle of caring. 
Obutaka Gathering Cycle

Communities rebuild land-sourced belonging, agency, and the calling to care for all life by sensing, deciding, and acting together.

Units of Caring

Community decisions become credible, fundable commitments that invite money to nourish what the place has determined is needed and valued.

Funders Learning Journey

Funders practise responding to life, reflect with peers, and ko-design higher-order capacities for accountability, value, and participation in living systems.

Communities of place

sense, deliberate and decide how and what relations need to heal.

Units of Caring
the membrane
Funders

respond with resources, reflection and institutional learning.

See how it worksMeet the totemic kin
What is already happening

A real place is already rebuilding stewardship capacity.

Since 2024, residents, landowners, future generations, and Nalubaaga Wetland have been rebuilding the capacity to care for life together across a 530-acre bioregion. Neighbours gathered in each other's homes. Landowners were asked whether they could move from protecting "my plot" toward stewarding "our place." More than ninety percent said yes.

More than eighty residents then walked the wetland together — mapping springs, flood zones, biodiversity, and waste flows. Some later changed how they related to waste, not because they had been instructed, but because they had begun to see themselves as part of a larger living whole.

What this has produced

A 19-member Organising Committee. A governance charter rooted in Obuntu. Thirty-five landowners enrolled as landstewards. A Council of Future Generations. A wetland recognised in governance. Nine relations chosen for healing.

Go deeper into the story →
What funders build together

Building something larger than your institution.

The journey is not a course. It is a practice field where funders work with peers to test how capital can respond to the entangled web of relations that nourishes life in a place. By the end, the most valuable thing you carry away may not be a funded activity. It is having helped shape a new way for money to move — and a working blueprint you can take back to your own institution and the places you care about.

A new diligence practice.Read the quality of relations, community will and place intelligence before money moves.
A peer learning field. Stand with other funders who are also naming the institutional habits they want to evolve. Name the limits of control-oriented funding together, and prototype past them.
A working blueprint. Follow a Unit of Caring from decision to renewal. Help shape a financial nourishment architecture that other bioregions can adapt from their own culture and land. See money move at the speed of caring, without rewriting a community's intent into a proposal.
Carry the blueprint home.Leave with a financial-nourishment pattern other bioregions — and your own portfolio — can adapt.
Different doors for different funders

Begin where you are on your own journey.

Wherever you are — quietly curious, or ready to act — there is a way in. Each door feeds the same growing field of funders learning to fund differently.

Start light

A 12-month email journey

For the curious and the unsure. One short letter a month — stories, questions, and reflections — to explore funding differently at your own pace. No platform, no pressure.

Step closer

An Open Resonance Call

A two-hour exploratory circle with peer funders. Bring the question you are already holding — no prior commitment.

Request a call →
Begin the covenant

Let a totem choose you

When you are ready, enter a living relationship with a totemic kin of the bioregion and write a Letter of Intention.

Begin a covenant →

Know a funder who should be here? Refer a funder you know →